4 July 2003 (4 Tamuz 5763)
I am becoming more and more concerned the linguistic future of Japan. I believe that every human being has an instinctive desire to communicate, including those who are poor at or afraid of communication, and I have seen enough evidences that support this. But I see more and more people in this country who are being deprived of their innate faculty of speech, not through linguistic disorders such as aphasia but through "socialization" as it is interpreted in present-day Japan.
To be linguistically "sophisticated" in Japan seems to mean to be as formulaic and ritualized as possible in one's speech in public and often in private without showing one's spontaneous emotions and ideas. In my opinion this stems from a very immature fear of encountering some negative response from others and subsequent conflicts with them. It is true that as long as you speak in a formulaic and ritualized manner that is considered "kosher" for each social context, you can minimize the risk of being criticized and/or hurt.
These days, however, I notice quite a few young people who cannot even speak even in such a predetermined manner, to say nothing of speaking spontaneously, even when they have to say something for their own benefits. Many of them simply seem to prefer sacrificing their benefit, hence keeping silent, to running the smallest risk of being rejected.
This week I had a chance to make an interesting experiment to examine this. When I was eating lunch at some restaurant, three students, who seemed to go everywhere not because they were good friends but because they were afraid of being alone, came in. They could not find a place where three of them could sit together though there were vacant seats here and there. Since they were waiting right behind me, they could ask me to move to another vacant seat so that they could sit together. If they had asked me, I would have been more than happy to do so. Of course, I could feel from their look that they were expecting me to do so. But since I do not like such a childish way of expecting someone else's favor without saying such a very simple thing, I decided to remain in the same place and see what they would say. I waited and waited, but none of the three dared ask me this and preferred waiting until three consecutive seats became vacant. I was disappointed, but continued observing them. I was even more disappointed to see that although they waited to sit together, they kept silent once they found their place, and each one concentrated on his meal. If so, why did they have to wait at all to sit together?
Unfortunately, such a behavior is now a rule rathan than an exception in this country. I am not surprised to hear that many young men here remain single partly because they cannot confess their love to the women they love. As far as I am concerned, this is not, of course, the reason or one of the reasons why I still remain single.
11 July 2003 (11 Tamuz 5763)
Where is Japan going? Although I disagree with many of the social customs of this country, I do care about its future as it is after all where I was born and brought up. I am especially worried about the increasing number of impulsive crimes, including murder, committed by teenagers and minors either with no rational motives or as an emotional reaction to rational criticism directed at their gross misconduct in public.
Sadly, we hear so many cases of this kind of murder these days that we are not surprised, although shocked, to hear another case in the news. I fear that Japan is gradually but steadily collapsing from inside, and this destructive force seems to be much stronger than the military threat of some neighboring totalitarian regimes.
What has gone wrong in this society? It seems to me that in the postwar Japan home and school education has stopped training the youth to be adults aware of their social obligations. Instead, they are encouraged, especially by naive leftist teachers, to excercise their "right of freedom", which is in most cases nothing but selfishness. It may be important to vindicate one's right, but it is legitimate only if one fulfills ones responsibility.
Unfortunately, this country is full of more and more young people who have been educated this distorted version of freedom. As a result, they are only physically adults, but emotionally they are childish and fragile. Since many of them have been pampered under the name of "freedom" without being scolded or criticized by adults, including their own parents. So it may be rather natural for them to lose control over themselves when they are scolded or criticized by others in public and go so far as to react by killing them.
I believe that there still remain enough conscientious adults, but even they would hesitate to criticize the misconduct of the young as they might have to pay the price of being killed for their criticism. This is apparently a vicious circle, and in the meanwhile there seems to be nothing that may be able to reverse it. Where is Japan going?
18 July 2003 (18 Tamuz 5763)
Browsers, mailers and word processors are probably the three types of software which average netizens use most frequently every day. It is most likely that the majority of the average users of Windows are using Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Word as their default or exclusive browser, mailer and word processor respectively. This may be partly because these programs were technically superior in certain areas to their competitors at least sometime in the past but is mainly because their manufacturer Microsoft markets them aggressively, and they are preinstalled in almost all the personal computers sold around the world as of this writing.
There may be many people who believe that Microsoft will continue to maintain a monopoly in these areas. But things can change so quickly in the world of the Internet and computers. Today's victors can be tomorrow's losers. Netscape is a good example. Who could imagine that this browser suite, which had an overwhelming share in the browser market until a few years ago, would be buried in oblivion? Version 4 was the probably the heyday of this browser suite. Although it was known to be a nightmare among web developers, Netscape had the chutzpah to continue to ship this dinosaur, and they are apparently paying the price now. Actually, when everyone was using Netscape 4.x, I tried to convince people to switch to Internet Explorer because of its better multilingual support and standards compliance. It seems that history repeats itself. Microsoft has announced to stop the development of Internet Explorer as a free standalone browser in spite of its less than perfect standards compliance, thus making it a dinosaur like its former competitor.
I used to be an enthusiastic evangelist-cum-user of Word. For my rather specific needs of combining various languages, including Japanese, Hebrew, Yiddish, Esperanto and (broken) English, I tried many word processors spending thousands of bucks. Many people who wanted to write Hebrew and/or Yiddish used to use programs other than Word, and I tried to convince them to switch to Word because of its better multilingual support. But now all these programs I once used, including Word, are not in my computer any longer. I also stopped using Word because it seemed to me that it was also becoming a dinosaur like its cousin Internet Explorer.
I hate not only to hear people who hate Microsoft without explaining sound technical reasons but also to be considered a Microsoft basher just to sound like a maven, but I have to say that the business model of Microsoft apparently belongs to the past century but not to our century in the area of the Internet and computers. The open source movement is gaining momentum and seems to have reached a stage in which its advocates can make equal or even better products than commercial companies. In my opinion, the open source Mozilla Browser and Mail, and OpenOffice.org Writer are already much better than Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Word respectively not only in functionality but also in areas hidden from the eyes of average users, including security, standards compliance and crossplatform compatibility. I, a long-time evangelist of Microsoft products, have become an evangelist of these open source programs.
The next natural step would be to switch from Windows to an open source operating system such as Linux. But in terms of multilingual support, which is crucial for me, Windows is still much better, so I am still using Windows, which has become the only Microsoft product I am still in my computer.
25 July 2003 (25 Tamuz 5763)
Language choice is an interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon, but when it becomes your personal issue, it can cause an internal conflict in your mind. Generally speaking, you and your interlocutor have only one language or language variety in common in which both of you are (more or less) fluent, so you have no choice but to use it. But if you know that you and your interlocutor are (more or less) fluent in more than one language or language variety, on what basis or bases do you choose the language or language variety to communicate with each other?
As a person who is involved in several linguistic communities, including three varieties of Japanese, English, Hebrew, Yiddish and Esperanto at least, I often encounter this problem. The choice depends not only on the fluency of the language or language variety to be chosen but also on other contextual factors. In certain cases I find myself switching languages in speaking with one person.
Whatever the factors are that decide the choice in the first chance of communication, whether in speech or in writing, it is relatively easy to choose the language as you simply follow the precedence, that is, you use the language you used last time with the person in question. And the more you speak or write in that language with that person, the the closer the connection between the language and the person in your mind. So if some circumstances compel you to speak with him or her in another language, you feel rather awkward even when both of you are fluent in it.
I feel this awkwardness when I use English for technical reasons in corresponding with my Israeli friends and colleagues with whom I always speak in Hebrew. But even this is not comparable to the awkwardness I feel when I speak with my sister in quasi-standard Japanese. According to the principle of following the precedence, we are supposed to use the dialect of the place where both of us were born and brought up. But the last time we spoke in it massively was before I left my parents' place, and she was still a junior high school student.
I had to get acquainted with her as a new person as it were after I came back from Israel ten years ago. By then we had lived separately for more than ten years without speaking intimately with each other, and she had spent a number of years in Tokyo using quasi-standard Japanese as I did in the Kansai region. So when I had to get acquainted with her anew, the principle of following the precedence was not effective enough, so we started speaking with each other in quasi-Japanese, especially for the linguistic accommodation of her boyfriend.
Every time I speak with my sister in this quasi-standard Japanese, I feel extremely uncomfortable, but choosing the local dialect we used in our childhood would make me feel even more uncomfortable. A few years ago she asked me to speak to her in English as she wanted to improve her proficiency in spoken English. Ironically, I felt quite comfortable then, but of course it would be ridiculous to always speak to her in (broken) English. In order to minimize as much as possible this uncomfortableness, I am trying to choose those forms that are more or less common between standard Japanese and Akita dialect, but this puts me in the position of a simultaneous interpreter and enormously strains my limisted linguistic capacity.